A suspect in the bombing at a California fertility clinic who was found dead in a federal detention center this week died by suicide, Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office records show.
Daniel Park, 32, was found unresponsive in his cell at the Metropolitan Detention Center around 7:30 a.m. Tuesday and pronounced dead at a hospital, the U.S. Justice Department said.
The medical examiner’s office listed the manner of death Thursday as suicide and the cause as blunt force trauma.
A spokesperson for the medical examiner’s office said it could not provide more details about how Park died, because the medical examiner’s investigation is ongoing and a report is not finished.
The federal Bureau of Prisons, which is the law enforcement agency investigating Park’s death, said it did not have any additional information to share Thursday.
Park was arrested on June 3 on allegations that he supplied materials used by another man to make a car bomb that was detonated outside an American Reproductive Centers fertility clinic on May 17. The bomber, Guy Edward Bartkus, died in the blast.
Park had been jailed at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles after he was arrested in Poland, where he fled after the bombing, and flown back to the United States. He was charged with providing and attempting to provide material support to terrorists.
The FBI called the bombing an act of terrorism. Bartkus is believed to have been motivated by an “anti-natalism” ideology, officials have said. Anti-natalism refers to the belief that no one should have children.
Park shared those views, the Justice Department has said, and he shipped 180 pounds of ammonium nitrate to Bartkus and paid for the shipment of an additional 90 pounds before the bombing.
Ammonium nitrate is a fertilizer that can be used in explosives. The substance was also used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which targeted a federal building and killed 168 people.
Leave a Reply